First impressions of landing on another planet; 'first' being the operative word; maybe 'last', too. In fact, these impressions are the only impressions I ever recall. It is as if I have just awoken from a dark dream of death, to find myself a ready-made person: with this huge vista before me or below me, a sloping horizon, a panorama that drunkenly approaches through the glass aperture of some cockpit. That cockpit may be my head. I'm not sure yet. I'll keep you briefed as things progress

But I am not being completely straight with you. I must admit to a hinterland which some would call 'the past' or others a force that drives reincarnations through the time zones, so as to maintain the species of life that I happen to represent. This hinterland, this dubious past, I'd call instinct, an instinct that I am human, a consciousness with a human body, with all the cultures and predispositions of a human being, including, for example, this very knowledge of the word 'human'.

I guess I could be accused of cheap science fiction ideas, here, which makes me such a slippery narrator, unsure of his own reality as well as that outside the cockpit window. I say his reality with some feeling. There are some things that are certainly not open to question.

The planet below my craft, still fast approaching, I also know (as a fact) to be an alien world. Not Earth.

I do know instinctively of a planet called Earth, even though I have never been there.

The dark dream of death which has been my only past heretofore is just a memory in itself now, perhaps.  This thought comes from simply letting time pass and such matters slowly to crystallise – and, perhaps, I will later recall that blank expanse of nothingness to be interspersed with real dreams.

Real dreams? That thought seems to be a bit of a paradox. But these dreams are populated, no doubt, with figures that I once believed to be my friends and acquaintances, even someone who claims to be my wife, upon a rotating Earth where, I insist, I have never been before.

That woman's face – who has the word 'wife' written all over it – has a believability which I cannot shake off. A vision of meaning almost as large as the planet that shudderingly wheels into position (even as I speak) beyond my cockpit window. It looms through a vast panoply of twinkling diamonds; it shouts words that are louder than Big Bangs.

I am determined to concentrate on landing.

My first impressions of the landscape that my craft orbits is one quite unlike anything one might see on the place I think of as Earth. The colours themselves are nameless; and very bright, unlike the dull browns and greys of most vaguely fertile terrains within my instinctive expectations. The angles and curves of its contours are mostly puzzling, unmathematical  in configuration.

The roaming life that seems to have its home here is made up of just shapes and shadows with pinprick lights that are quite in the wrong position to be eyes. Do I dare land? And if I do not land, what other options are there?

There is a sucking sensation behind me – as if some polar magnet draws me back, without any volition from the force that I call my mind.

Human faces (at a quick glimpse), as I rotate the cockpit to ascertain the nature of this sucking force, seem to be patterned in the force's weft and woof like a modern painting that nobody can understand.

Each face seems to enjoy prominence for a while, before others take its place. Recognition is not a word I would use lightly in present circumstances. But I did say a quick glimpse behind, and that was all it was, because the cockpit automatically rotated into its more natural forward position, intent on helping me land what is quickly turning out to be an unwieldy craft. Upon what is equally turning out to be a troublesome terrain.

The planet is probably just one of those many twinkling diamonds through which I imagined my surrogate wife's face looming – and, indeed, beyond its unstable rim, I glimpse the huge mountainous nose of some other sister planet that probably keeps this one in gravitational balance. It is probably millions of miles further beyond, but so huge it looks much nearer than that. It is as if Jupiter had suddenly taken upon itself the need to rise as a moon upon Earth from the normal Lunar distance.

I suddenly recall a fixed memory in the past. A lighthouse beacon in a stormy sea of amnesic nightmare. It is a ring on a finger. Sparkling with the glint of love's power. A golden ridge near a mountainous knuckle. A diamond as bright as the soul I can no longer find within myself.

First impressions, then. That it is my future, not my past. But which way does time flow, I ask? No answer. The ringed flesh is grey and brown, not pink – with carbuncles like compost heaps that promise fertility, if nothing else. Each a stinking cockpit.

The diamond is dead but its sparkle remains, because diamonds are cut to last, cutting to the bottom bone of dream.

'Words' that convey an intrinsic felt love, but like all words, have to end somewhere.